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How would I batch rename a lot of files using command-line?

rated 0 times [ 2] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 3496 / 2 Years ago, sun, february 20, 2022, 5:26:04

I have a problem which I am unable to solve: I need to rename a great dump of files using patterns. I tried using this, but I always get an error.

I have a folder, inside with a lot of files. Running ls -1 | wc -l, it returns that I have like 160000 files inside. The problem is, that I wish to move these files to a Windows system, but most of them have characters like : and ? in them, which makes the file unaccessible on said Windows-based systems.

(As a "do not solve but deal with" method, I tried booting up a LiveCD on the Windows system and moving the files using the live OS. Under that Ubuntu, the files were readable and writable on the mounted NTFS partition, but when I booted back on Windows, it showed that the file is there but Windows was unable to access it in any fashion: rename, delete or open.)

I tried running rename 's/:/_' * inside the folder, but I got Argument list too long error. Some search revealed that it happens because I have so many files, and then I arrived here. The problem is that I don't know how to alter the command to suit my needs, as I always end up having various errors like

Trying find -name '*:*' | xargs rename : _, it gives xargs: unmatched single quote; by default quotes are special to xargs unless you use the -0 option [
] syntax error at (eval 1) line 1, near ":" [
] xargs: rename: exited with status 255; aborting

Adding the -0 after xargs turns the error message to xargs: argument line too long

These files are archive files generated by various PHP scripts. The best solution would be having a chance to rename them before they are moved to Windows, but if there is no way to do it, we might have a way to rename the files while they are moved to Windows. I use samba and proftpd to move the files.

Unfortunately, graphical software are out of the question as the server containing the files is what it is, a server, with only command-line interface.

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ardingiba

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2 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago girdleas · Accepted Answer

Using find's -exec should work, though it'll recurse through subdirectories, which in turn will fail if any of the subdirectories happen to contain : or ?.

find . -name "*[:?]*" -exec rename 'y/:?/__/' {} +

The argument list too long error you get because the * gets expanded to all 160k files in the directory, which exceeds the maximum argument length on your system.

$ getconf ARG_MAX

2097152

160k filenames may easily exceed 2MiB. You can work past this by either renaming one file at a time

for file in ./*[:?]*; do 

    mv "$file" "${file//[:?]/_}"

done

or fill an array and process them in chunks. How large the chunk could be depends on the average length of the filenames and the ARG_MAX value; or just set a low enough value to be safe, e.g. 1000:

files=( ./*[:?]* ) n=${#files[@]}

size=1000

for (( i=0; i<n; i+=size )); do

    rename 'y/:?/__/' "${files[@]:i:size}"

done

Also see BashFAQ 30.